How to Measure Anything Quotes

“we know that decision makers will experience an increase in confidence in their decisions even when the analysis or information-gathering methods are found to be ineffectual. This is part of what Dawes called the “illusion of learning.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Very few experts actually measure their performance over time, and they tend to summarize their memories with anecdotes. They are right sometimes and wrong sometimes, but the anecdotes they remember tend to be more flattering to them.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Modeling the world mathematically is as uniquely a human trait as language or art, but you would rarely find anyone complaining of being “reduced to a poem” or “reduced to a painting.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“the objection to using stats boils down to nothing more than an irrational fear of numbers causing some to believe math somehow detracts from understanding or appreciation”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business

“The fact is that the preference for ignorance over even marginal reductions in ignorance is never the moral high ground. If decisions are made under a self-imposed state of higher uncertainty, policy makers (or even businesses like, say, airplane manufacturers) are betting on our lives with a higher chance of erroneous allocation of limited resources. In measurement, as in many other human endeavors, ignorance is not only wasteful but can also be dangerous.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business

“If you don’t know what to measure, measure anyway. You’ll learn what to measure.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“What they really mean is that “numbers can be used to confuse people, especially the gullible ones lacking basic skills with numbers.” With this, I completely agree,”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“The commonplace notion that presumes measurements are exact quantities ignores the usefulness of simply reducing uncertainty, especially if eliminating uncertainty is not feasible (as is usually the case).”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“If we incorrectly think that measurement means meeting some nearly unachievable standard of certainty, then few things will be measurable even in the physical sciences.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“One of our measurement mentors, Enrico Fermi, was an early user of what was later called a “Monte Carlo simulation.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Consider these statistics. It used to cost Farm Journal, a client of Key Survey, an average of $4 to $5 per respondent for a 40- to 50-question survey of farmers. Now, using Key Survey, it costs Farm Journal 25 cents per survey, and it is able to survey half a million people.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Anything currently estimated using expensive survey methods can be researched in different ways by any Internet-literate college student.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“The Likert scale. Respondents are asked to choose where they fall on a range of possible feelings about a thing, generally in the form of “strongly dislike,” “dislike,” “strongly like,” “strongly disagree,” and “strongly agree.” Multiple choice. Respondents are asked to pick from mutually exclusive sets, such as “Republican, Democrat, Independent, other.” Rank order. Respondents are asked to rank order several items. Example: “Rank the following eight activities from least preferred (1) to most preferred (8).” Open ended. Respondents are asked to simply write out a response in any way they like. Example: “Was there anything you were dissatisfied with about our customer service?”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Given a particular observation, it may seem more obvious to frame a measurement by asking the question, “What can I conclude from this observation?” or, in probabilistic terms, “What is the probability X is true, given my observation?” But Bayes showed us that we could, instead, start with the question, “What is the probability of this observation if X were true?” The second form of the question is useful because the answer is often more straightforward and it leads to the answer to the first question. It also forces us to think about the probability of different observations given a particular hypothesis and what that means for interpreting an observation.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all. —Gilb’s Law”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“When presented new information, we have no other option than to relate it to what we already know—there is no blank space in our minds within which new information can be stored so as not to “contaminate” it with existing information. —Clifford Konold, Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, University of Massachusetts”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“whether a finding is statistically significant is not the same thing as whether your current state of uncertainty is less than it was before or what the economic value of that uncertainty reduction would be.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“The first 100 samples reduce uncertainty much more than the second 100. In fact, even the first 10 samples tell you a lot more than the next 10. The initial state of uncertainty tells you a lot about how to measure it.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“One example is how Amazon.com provides free gift wrapping in order to help track which books are purchased as gifts. At one point Amazon was not tracking the number of items sold as gifts; the company added the gift-wrapping feature to be able to track it. Another example is how consumers are given coupons so retailers can see, among other things, what newspapers their customers read. Inexpensive personal sensors and apps for smart devices are available for many types of measurement about human activity.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“It seems that to have a truly profound revelation, you almost always have to look at something other than what you have been looking at in the past. Being able to compute the value of information has caused organizations to look at completely different things—and doing so has frequently resulted in a surprise that changed the direction of a major decision.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Knowing something about the monetary value and cost of the information in a measurement puts a new light on what is “measurable.” If someone says a measurement would be too expensive, we have to ask, “Compared to what?” If a measurement that would just reduce uncertainty by half costs $50,000 but the EVPI is $5,000,000, then the measurement certainly is not “too expensive.” Indeed, it would be a bargain. But if the information value is zero, then any measurement is too expensive. Some measurements might have marginal information values—say, a few thousand dollars; not enough to justify some formal effort at measurement but a bit too much just to ignore. For those measurements, I try to think of approaches that can quickly reduce a little uncertainty—say, finding a related study or making a few phone calls to a few more experts.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved. —Charles Kettering (1876–1958), American inventor, holder of 300 patents, including electrical ignition for automobiles There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words. —Thomas Reid (1710–1769), Scottish philosopher”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“For all practical decision-making purposes, we need to treat measurement as observations that quantitatively reduce uncertainty. A mere reduction, not necessarily elimination, of uncertainty will suffice for a measurement.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“measure what matters, make better decisions.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Bandwagon bias.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“We find no sense in talking about something unless we specify how we measure it; a definition by the method of measuring a quantity is the one sure way of avoiding talking nonsense. . . . —Sir Hermann Bondi, mathematician and cosmologist3”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“what makes a measurement of high value is a lot of uncertainty combined with a high cost of being wrong.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“Once managers figure out what they mean and why it matters, the issue in question starts to look a lot more measurable.”
― Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business